Colour Inspiration: Orange
This is the first in a series of posts devoted to individual colours, mixing in a few facts with my personal opinions and some colour inspiration images. Orange is my starting point purely because I love its warm happy glow!
What do you think of orange? In the popularity contest of colours it's way down in the bottom 3 along with yellow and brown. However, amongst the people who like it, there are a select band who actually LOVE it!
Personally, the colour takes me right back to my 1970s childhood, where everything good had to be orange - Spacehoppers, Irn Bru, Orange Penguin biscuits, Ford Capri cars, Crimplene, furnishing fabrics and wallpaper to name but a few!
A Few Orange Facts
Did you know, orange is the only colour of the spectrum to have been named after an object...? You've guessed it, the orange.
Orange is the colour between yellow and red on the spectrum of visible light. Human eyes perceive orange when observing light with a dominant wavelength between roughly 585 and 620 nanometres.
In painting and traditional colour theory, it is a secondary colour of pigments, created by mixing yellow and red.
The orange colour of carrots, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, oranges, and many other fruits and vegetables comes from carotenes, a type of photosynthetic pigment. These pigments convert the light energy that the plants absorb from the sun into chemical energy for the plants' growth.
According to Wikipedia in Europe and America, surveys show that orange is the colour most associated with amusement, the unconventional, extroverts, warmth, fire, energy, activity, danger, taste and aroma, the Autumn season and particularly Halloween.
Warm colours like red and orange appear to advance forward. This is due to the wavelengths of warm colours being longer so the eye perceives them sooner than cooler colours such as blue and green. So a little orange can go a very long way!
How do you feel about orange now? Still not convinced...? Maybe my Orange Pinterest board will help change your mind.